Harvard, MIT, Penn & a Great Bill Maher Clip

Hey all,

What a week.

We saw the presidents of Harvard, MIT & Penn betray their commitment to free speech and equality for all individuals on campus. It was a stunning display of allegiance to the ideology of racial essentialism — as opposed to pledging “allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

These presidents knew they were wrong. The ones from Harvard and Penn issued weak apologies — Claudine Gay apologized for not speaking “my truth.” No, there’s just truth and she failed to commit to even that.

Representative Elise Stefanik who brilliantly questioned the three presidents — if you have not seen the clip, you must and it is here — refused to let them off the hook:

What made Representative Stefanik’s line of questioning powerful was that she did not exhibit a shred of white guilt. She showed no deference to the ideological gamesmanship played by the university presidents. Truth was her power. Imagine if our leaders had been like her all along.

The following day I had a reaction to all of this and, channeling my father’s ideas, quickly wrote a tweet that surprisingly went viral:

There has been much free speech debate but it is my belief that you cannot have free speech on a campus that has been ideologically captured by DEI — ideology demands conformity. Therefore, DEI must be eliminated and, you know what, it is then that true diversity of individuals will emerge and flourish.

Lastly, I woke up this morning to a great Bill Maher clip from last night that struck a deeply personal tone with me. Above his clip, Maher wrote: “How did we get to this weird place? Telling people who are actually out in the world making a positive difference, ‘You're the problem.’”

(You have to click twice and then the play button to get below video playing.)

Maher is 100% right. As some of you know, I was born profoundly deaf — cannot hear a shotgun go off right next to my ear. But good people invented the hearing aid just before I was born and that allowed me to hear 15% of what normal hearing people can hear. Somehow this little amount of sound gave me enough hearing to say my first word when I was four — after 3 years of auditory-verbal therapy along with the never-ending dedication of my parents. Then good people invented the cochlear implant and when I got it at the age of 25 it gave me about 85% of what normal hearing people can hear. I compared it to going from a Pinto to a Rolls Royce. After 6 months of AV therapy where I had to learn to rehear all over again, I had my first ever phone call in my life — with my mother on Mother’s Day. Good people inventing things is how you uplift people, include more people, and make the world a better place — not the ideology of racial essentialism embraced by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn. Here’s to the good people for I would not be here without you and would not have had the opportunity to test myself out in the real world.

Have a great weekend,

Eli